All kidding aside, when the day comes to replace my PC, I exspect to buy another PC. I'm just more comtable with the Windows envioment.

However having my first laptop, a 13 inch Macbook Pro for the last year (not counting a little 10inch Lenovo net book I had for the previous year)

I'm convince that no other laptop is as nice. When I have used my friends pc laptops or even friends older Macbooks Im just amazined how mych better/nicer the new ones are.

By better nicer I mean

1) durrable alum, very solid and light
2)Top LCD
3)That fantatic large toutch pad and all in one clicker, pure genius.
4) back lighted keyboard

1) Yes one pays at least 25% more
2) Yes one can get faster more powerful, but I find whatever difference in power/speed is unnoticable to me, looking at speed charts are fun but in real ife what does it mean, little for myself. If I use phoito shop an action might take 1.3 sec's so what if another can do it in 1 sec?

btw,yes the touch pad is a lot bigger at Macs,which is very nice I will never use that...I am used with a mouse. And the LCD is not better than others aqsually...it's a marketing mith. I saw many LCDs & I was not impressed at all

all I can remember about Mac is that they only have the Drive selections... lame

Does Sandybrige sound old to u?
Does GTX580 in Quad SLI sound old to u?
or for Pro uses: 4x Tesla C1060
You get the picture...

and Mac Pro's still using dual HD5770.... not even a pro enough graphics card. should be FireGL or Tesla -.-

As I say: macs r great in design... but they never beat the performance or price of a PC

_________________http://www.AnderssonPhoto.com Equipment: A blend of Canon, Nikon, Yashica, Leica, Voigtlander, Samyang and Sigma. All of which you can see on my website!Wishlist: Leica M 240, Summilux 50 ASPH, Summilux 24 ASPH

Agree perfer a mouse myself and have a nice potable wireless logitec, still there are times I don't want to lugged anymore than I need and will leave the mouse at home, and if I need to use only a touchtpad the oversize pad withl all in one clicker is nice, has spoild me.

Don, you may be correct regarding the lcd, I can only go by what I have read, some say that Apples lcd are more accuate when calibrated, true or not, I can only go by what I have seen, a friend picked up a recent 17 from dell and and the lcd has nothing on the mac and the dell toutchpad is about have what is on my 13 incher, makes me what to smash it, it's horrible!

Price power agree far better bang for the buck going with a PC.

I'm no Apple lover or fan boy as far as OS system, but I do ike that laptops, kinda compare to a Leica, they are way overprice, not always better, sometimes not as good, but they just feel good....

@Bob - I caved in and bought a macbook air at the macstore in Opera today. That start time is just too hard to resist.....

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you but I was away for a few days.

I'm still delighted with mine but unfortunately I'm going to have to run Windows on it later this year, either via Bootcamp or in a VM, as I now have a need to run software (a hardware control program) which is just not available running under OS X. I say "unfortunately" not because I have a problem running Windows (I still wouldn't run anything else as my OS on a main machine) but because it somehow doesn't seem quite right putting it on an Air.

Please, I am the one who is sorry, I still owe you the review of my 1div and Gordon the guide to gigapixel photography. I hope to get these both done within the next month, it is just I am so busy and seem to spend my life travelling at the moment. Still, back in Paris tonight and finishing the Windows 7 install on my Mac. I have dedicated most of the drive space to the install, but still have OSx on it. I have no choice as my photoshop 5 is a windows version, which I cannto install on a Mac unless I pay for a licence conversion, which is no good as my desktop is a PC..... Windows runs nice on it, though it does not boot as fast as OSX, which is just awesome:)

For my very first contribution on this forum, i'll share with you my computer choice as i got a new one today.

I'm using a laptop mac, for a simple reason (i'll put aside the fact that i use final cut and that i cherrish logic studio since we are talking about photography here and that i have a mac pro dedicated to music and video only).

For photo, i mostly use lightroom and also photoshop element. You all know that those 2 can run on almost any config. So why using a macbook pro then? Well, not for performances or design (i've seen pretty cool pc laptops) when i buy a laptop, i want it to be operational right away and not have to have to do any kinds of settings, or optmisation or whatever you need to do to make a regular out of the box pc, a kick ass computer. The one who know how to do would say how easy it is to change the startup thing, the background programs thing, the clock whatever thing....yeah, ok, but i don't want to do that, i tried, i didn't like. Same when my niece tried pineapple, she tried, she didn't like, period.

Since the last thing on earth i want to do is computer maintenance, all the pcs i had were just a piece of crap after less than a year. I already have way too much to do, way too much to learn in photography and video to loose time on this when i can just have something totally hassle free.

I just got a new macbookpro and my old mac that i heavily used 6 years, was running the same yesterday than 6 years ago with zero maintenance or advanced settings.

I guess it's like with cameras, some people want/like/need to take theirs out of their pockets, point, click and end of the story.

Hardware-wise, I like Windows over OSX because I like to build and upgrade my own PC's. I also avoid the cheapest pre-built Windows PC's because they put the cheapest components inside and bloat it up with useless software that has to be removed. I prefer to do it myself and choose components of decent quality. Once you hit mid-range performance, it ends up being cheaper to do it yourself anyways.

Software-wise: From a usability standpoint, the OSX interface is foreign when I try it, but I think if I used it more it'd be just as good. Lack of software is a problem, and buying a copy of Windows on top of OSX is more money. Viruses are a bigger threat on Windows, but the most important anti-virus sits between the keyboard and the chair. And like many people said, Macs are not immune. Here's the latest on Mac malware:
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=21795

Half a year ago I had saved enough money to replace my old laptop, which had turned into a stationary PC because of a broken screen.

My sister had been using Mac for years on MacBooks and told me that I had to try it out. I talked with a lot of friends about this - both Mac users and PC users - and the Mac side of my friends told me it had been an easy transition and that they were all happy about it and the PC side said I shouldn't bother. I should add that the PC side actually haven't tried Mac too much.

So with that in my mind, I went and got myself a MacBook Pro with the anticipation of a good experience. At first it seemed like my transition would go well and that life with Mac was indeed as smooth as I had been told.

Being quite a big gamer, I installed Windows via BootCamp to accommodate that need. I had Portal 2 installed for Mac via the Steam client, but it just didn't run as smooth as I had hoped on the Mac platform. So, with both Windows and Mac on my laptop, I thought I would be satisfied.

Then I gradually became more and more frustrated with the difference of how Mac handles things like folder structure compared to Windows. There are other things that irritate me, but I have been booting into Windows for the last 4 months, so I have blissfully forgotten those in the meantime. I just remember the frustration with Mac. Also, the lack of support from Logitech for Mac made all the nice buttons of my favorite mouse unusable. I did get a copy of SteerMouse, but that has gone sour and doesn't recognize the button assignment anymore, destroying workflow. Also things like the way the interface of Photoshop is not collected into a single window but is kind of scattered along the edges of the screen irritates me, as I often click in the area next to the canvas area to get out of the selection menus. If I do that in Mac, the interface disappears altogether as I have clicked "outside" the interface. Word's interface is also different from PC, which destroys my workflow every time I try writing something in Mac. I guess I am slowly remembering what irritated me about Mac now. Destruction of workflow.

The thing is that I have all things photography installed on my Mac, so I hardly ever get any post-processing done, as I am in Windows all the time. I have a 250 GB partition for Windows and a 500 GB partition for Mac. The 500 GB more or less just sits there, as it is not possible to copy to the drive from Windows, making them slightly useless for me. The Windows partition is almost full and cannot accommodate photography related programs because of games taking up the space.

I know almost all of my issues with using Mac is not because of Mac itself but comes from what I have been used to with PC. My main grudge is that my sister and my friends on the Mac side all said that the transition would be painless and easy. For me it hasn't been. I'm also the kind of person who takes a long time getting into new stuff because I am lazy. If it doesn't work logically based on the experiences I have had with previous encounters of similar scenarios I get easily frustrated. I would probably embrace Mac if someone with knowledge of how to make it behave as I expect it to (or to tell me how to expect it to behave) would sit down with me and work through my issues.

For now, though I regret spending a third extra of a very good PC laptop's price for the Mac, just to have a Windows laptop with a small hard drive and decent battery life. The battery is quite neat, though, as I can play Skyrim for 50-60 minutes which is the duration of my bus ride to and from university.

All in all, I will probably not be getting a Mac again based on personal preference and my disappointment that it wasn't as easy to go from PC to Mac as my friends and sister had let me to believe.

For me, PC is the right choice.

_________________Esben - used to be a wide angle photographer but then I took a Fuji X100 in the knee
My deviantART

If you're a gamer, the PC will always give you a better experience, no questions. I can run L4D2 and source-based games no problem on my MBP, and I do have a small (75GB) partition bootcamped to Win7 for some RTS games, but my productivity happens in OS X. The only small irritation I have with OS X is that when attempting to copy files with duplicate names, there's no option to keep both and rename one of them... But otherwise, I love the touchpad gestures, and the interface is quite good. I feel quite at home on both platforms now, even if I'm accidentally using the alt-key in Windows to do things like copying and pasting...